Is it the cow that sells the steak, or the sizzle? Using animal images to sell meat in mid-nineteenth-century Belgium

Abstract

Per capita meat consumption in post-industrial countries is higher today than it has been ever since the transition of hunter-gathering to agriculture, while attitudes toward meat production and animal killing have become increasingly characterized by moral ambiguity and disgust. To contribute to our understanding of the genesis of this meat paradox, this study analyses how mid-nineteenth-century Belgian meat retailers constructed the image of their product. Analyzing 54 porcelain cards, uniquely early pictorial business cards used to advertise, shows how they constructed a very specific image of meat and its production process, an image in which meat itself was almost wholly absent. As shifts in the production process removed the animals behind the urban meat supply further and further from urbanites’ sight, meat retailers deliberately called upon images of idealized healthy living animals in profoundly natural settings. Reminders of the brutal production process were avoided at all costs. Rather, meat retailers sold the idea of meat consumption as intricately linked to a romanticized pastoral life, where animals lived free from human constraints or instrumentalization. This highly paradoxical “naturalisation” process, cutting out all human intervention in the production of meat, still serves to underpin important cultural aspects of the meat paradox today.